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Hello again fellow readers, I return to bring you an update on one of my past guest posts. As some of you may recall, I wrote a review of Face The Jury a few months ago detailing my experiences in being judged by the panel of appearance experts found on said site (if you don't remember my article, you can find it in the archives for May 2001).

A few months passed, and my FTJ account lay dormant and forgotten until this past Friday, when I started receiving IMs about it. What started as a trickling-in of "U R so right man!!!1 Nice article!!" messages became a full fledged deluge of both congratulatory and inflammatory missives. Apparently one of the administrators of FTJ came across my article here last week and decided to, without asking permission of either myself or David and michael, post it to the front page of Face the Jury in the "Members Voice" section. You can imagine what kind of response I got from an article that basically thrashed all aspects of Face the Jury. A positive one. That's right, in the past three days I have received upwards of 40 emails on my FTJ account, numerous intra-site instant messages, and countless AOL Instant Messages congratulating me on "telling it like it is". It was getting so bad I had to block all non-buddy-list users on AIM because I couldn't do any work on my computer without being interrupted numerous times.

In another interesting twist, my FTJ "rating", which had previously languished at a modest 6.023, skyrocketed in three days to an astounding 7.5. Apparently (and I hope you're taking notes out there guys), girls are even more attracted to sarcasm and mockery than they are to upside-down visors and bleach-tipped hair. I've been propositioned on IM (further necessitating the blockage of random messages since my girlfriend may get the wrong idea) and jumped to a rating higher than 90% of the other males on the site. It is fortunate that Face the Jury provides me with stats like this, how else would I accurately judge my attractiveness in comparison to a variety of pictures ripped from Abercrombie ads and blurry webcam ab shots? It's like class rank gone horribly, horribly wrong, where the ranking is entirely subjective (wait, that actually sounds a lot like class rank...).

The point to all this is threefold:

a) Nothing on the internet is private, no matter how little publicity it gets. This makes me wonder why so many ".com" companies spent millions of dollars on advertising, since I spent zero dollars advertising my article and ended up getting more hits than bilge like mytvtaxi.com.

b) People will always steal your work without asking or giving any credit to the source. There are many people on FTJ who think I wrote the article in the intention of being published on the site. One person even accused me (in the much-maligned General Forum no less) of writing it just to get votes. Damn, they've seen through my elaborate plan. Write a post for -273 in the hopes that someday, somehow, someone from FaceTheJury will randomly stumble across it and publish it, uncredited, on their main page, therefore allowing me to achieve the elusive and oh-so-desirable #1 ranking. This person, in a nutshell, validates all points I made in my initial article.

c) I have gotten much, much more attractive since the beginning of May, at least that's what the distinguished panel of appearance experts is telling me.

In conclusion, I encourage all of you to watch your backs. You never know who could be scouring your weblog for publishable material...

Posted by Chris on 12 November 2001 at 4:34 PM